By the 1870s Japan was changing faster than almost any country in history. New railways, new factories, a new army — all of it had to be paid for. And the people who paid were mostly peasants.
In 1873 the Meiji government introduced the land tax reform: a fixed cash tax of 3% of land value, paid every year no matter the harvest. Under the old Tokugawa system, tax had been paid in rice and could flex with a bad year. Now peasants had to sell crops for cash even in famine years, just to pay the tax bill.
Why this hurt so much: It wasn't only the tax rate — it was the loss of flexibility. A poor harvest used to mean less rice handed over. After 1873 it meant debt, and often the loss of the family's land to a moneylender or landlord.
- Heavier, fixed burden — cash tax due every year regardless of harvest, unlike the old flexible rice-tax
- Conscription (1873) — young men taken from farm labour into the new army, straining household income further
- Rapid change — new schools, Western-style clothing rules, and a shrinking role for old village customs, all imposed quickly from Tokyo
- Result — a wave of peasant uprisings (hyakusho ikki) through the 1870s and 1880s, especially where tax and conscription hit hardest
These uprisings were usually local and put down quickly, but they reveal something important: the Meiji reforms that modernized Japan also created real hardship for ordinary people, not just the samurai elite.
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Peasants were not the only losers in the new Japan. The samurai — the old warrior class — lost their stipends, their swords, and their entire reason for existing almost overnight.
Between 1873 and 1876 the government abolished samurai pensions, banned the wearing of swords in public, and folded the old domain armies into a single conscript force open to all classes. For a class that had defined itself by military service for centuries, this felt like erasure.
Grievance builds (1873–1876)
Stipends cut, swords banned, conscription opens the army to commoners — samurai status is dismantled piece by piece.
Saigo Takamori leads
Saigo Takamori, a former Meiji leader who had resigned from government in 1873, becomes the figurehead for samurai anger in Satsuma domain (southern Kyushu).
Rebellion breaks out (Jan–Sep 1877)
Around 40,000 samurai rise up, besieging Kumamoto Castle before being pushed back by the new conscript army.
Crushed at Shiroyama
The rebellion ends in September 1877 at the Battle of Shiroyama — Saigo is killed, and samurai resistance as an armed force is finished for good.
Cut → Saigo → Siege → Shiroyama.
Significance, not just narrative: The Satsuma Rebellion matters because it proved the new conscript army — filled with peasants and commoners, not samurai — could defeat Japan's best-trained warriors. That was the real end of the samurai age, not just a single lost battle.
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A Paper 1 source set on this inquiry question might include a government tax notice, a samurai's letter about the 1876 sword ban, and a newspaper report on the Sino-Japanese War. Each one needs to be read differently.
Take a hypothetical Source A: a petition from Fukushima peasants in 1876, complaining that the land tax forces them to sell rice "even when our children go hungry." Its content directly answers the inquiry question — it shows the human cost of the land tax in the peasants' own words.
Worked example — reading Source A: Read Source A in three steps: its content, its context, then how you can use it.
| Step | Source A |
|---|---|
| Content | Describes hunger and forced grain sales caused by the fixed cash tax — direct evidence of peasant hardship. |
| Context | A petition (origin), written BY peasants FOR local officials (purpose = persuade authorities to act), from 1876 (time = just before the tax rate was cut slightly in 1877). That makes it powerful eyewitness testimony, but also one-sided — petitioners exaggerate suffering to make their case stronger. |
| Use | Reliable for showing peasant experience and complaint, but must be checked against government records for the actual tax rate and its effects. |
A peasant petition (bottom-up view)
- Written by ordinary villagers, for local officials
- Emphasizes suffering and hunger to win sympathy
- Shows how policy felt on the ground
- May exaggerate — it is trying to persuade, not just record
A government tax record (top-down view)
- Written by officials, for administrative purposes
- States rates and revenue collected, not human impact
- Shows the policy's actual scale and design
- May understate hardship — it is not designed to show suffering
Perspectives across a source set: For Q3 [12], don't just describe each source separately — compare them. A peasant petition and a government record can agree on the FACT of the tax (both mention 3% of land value) while completely disagreeing on its EFFECT. That agreement/disagreement pattern is exactly what "examine perspectives" is asking for.